The Inkwell

Well, gee, the should’ve issued it in ten parts. Honestly! Who dropped the ball there?

I don’t think there’s any album that takes me back to high school quite like Pearl Jam’s Ten. The whole grunge experience was so new and exciting to me back then. I remember listening to Ten on bus rides after volleyball games, all my mix tapes contained a Pearl Jam track, I can remember classmates making remarks on certain tracks - why they did or did not like them. Ah, the good old days.

Pearl Jam is releasing a new collector’s edition of Ten in March with the remasterered original album, a remixed album by long-time producer Brendan O’Brien, awesome new cover art spearheaded by bassist Jeff Ament and a replica demo tape with old school recordings of “Alive”, “Once” and “Footsteps”.

Ament says of the “Momma Son” demo tape,

“I think the first time that [vocalist Eddie Vedder] or I had opened any of those boxes was a few weeks ago. I knew that the original ‘Momma-Son’ cassette was somewhere, but I hadn’t listened to it in 17, 18, 19 years. It was cool to sit down and play it for the first time with Ed and see his reaction. And to find that 90% of it stayed exactly the same as what ended up on the record. A lot of elements were identical. There was some energy flying around at that point even from 1,300 miles away from Seattle to San Diego.”

I can’t wait to see how it turns out.